


Of Pressure

by AliLamba



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, F/M, Porn, Porn with Feelings, Season/Series 03, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-21
Updated: 2016-04-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 16:09:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6617284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliLamba/pseuds/AliLamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They shouldn't be together. This is an obvious, indisputable fact.</p><p>It really should be easier in practice.</p><p> </p><p>Skyeward, for week three of Skyeward Smut Fest, prompt: craving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Pressure

**Author's Note:**

> This has been on my laptop in various stages for about…an entire year. It’s literally the reason I signed up for the Smut Fest, because I needed the imperative to finish it. Is it done? Nah. But it is done enough.

 

> _The earthquake, is making, the house shake, the house shake._  
>  I don’t know, what to do, in times of disaster.  
>  Solid things, go liquid, and the breath, gets faster.  
>  I ask you, what you think, of my forward question.  
>  Is this a, release or, a build-up, of pressure.  
>  \- Mirah

 

 

Skye wakes up still caught in the dream.

For a long moment she doesn’t move, lying in silence in the dark room, letting the dream rinse from her mind. She can still feel the remnants, the leftover emotions, but the plot is hazy now. It’s tainting her mood without a good reason. Or maybe she’s just feeling malcontent because – she’s there again.

Skye’s gaze flicks to her sidearm, resting on the bedside table. It’s always impressive that her gun manages to stay within arm’s reach, when the rest of her clothes are scattered through the rest of the house, well – this one-room shack.

She sighs, softly, trying not to wake him. Which is ridiculous. The mattress slopes as he shifts his weight beside her, and she closes her eyes.

It’s time to go.

Skye leans up against gravity, perching on the side of the bed to look around the room, tagging her belongings with her eyes, stacking them in order of relevance. Her muscles are already showing signs of soreness – _overuse_ – really, and she knows the cure is a long, hot shower back on the Bus, and a nap in her own bed alone. Absently she wonders whether Coulson has called her during the night, but she sort of figures he hasn’t, because…well because he probably _knows_ – no, actually, she _knows_ he knows. That she’s dark. That he’s dark too.

He must recognize the pattern by now.

Her feet touch the floor. The tiles are starkly cold, but they feel almost pleasant against her skin, like aloe to a burn. She stares at her legs through strands of mussed hair, ignoring the shrapnel scar on her ankle that has mostly healed, the toenail that isn’t quite growing in the same after she lost it a few weeks ago.

She ignores these injuries because again she’s sitting in this little house in the middle of nowhere, one of the five or six they’ve established in as many years of doing this. She’s never really questioned where they came from. After the station wagon in that West Texas salvage yard she’s happy for any kind of bed.

Skye sighs, heaves her weight onto her non-tender foot, and walks to her shirt, shrugging it on. She slips on her underwear, wondering why she’s even doing this, again, getting dressed in the dark while he sleeps.

A stupid person would call it love. Maybe a slightly less dumb person would call it a bad habit.

Maybe she _should_ just call it blind-eyed lust and greed.

She can hear him stirring as she slides her pants up her legs, wiggling her thighs until she can fasten the button over her hips. She doesn’t have to look at him to know what it means when he inhales sharp and deep (awake now, filling in time and place), and when he exhales slowly (looking at her). They aren’t big talkers in the morning, as if conversation is the one sacrifice they make to acknowledge that what they’re doing is tragically wrong.

She pauses, so briefly.

Because this is the part where it sometimes happens again – where silence leads to transgression – so she grabs the first jacket that’s close, and it happens to be his, but she doesn’t much care as she drapes it over herself and tugs it around her torso, deciding to brave the midmorning air outside.

Wind rushes into her ears like a wave of noise, whipping through her hair immediately. The edge of the bluff is visible in the distance. Perhaps because she’s feeling reckless (or adrift, or just because this terrain is so familiar to her) she approaches it without fear, finds a place to sit near the precipice.

He’ll be getting up himself by now.

Her brain automatically flits through all the ways he could sabotage her. Her gun is still inside, for one. Her phone too. She can’t even see her bike from this vantage point, so he could incapacitate it easily, and she’ll – she’s not even sure how she would make it out of that jam.

Instinctually though (or maybe, just out of practice), she knows he’ll start his day with the idea of following her. He’ll rub his palm across his jaw to check what kind of stubble he has to deal with. He’ll get dressed in some fluid, natural way, and if she’d been there as witness he’d crack jokes about room service.

A small smile cinches the corner of her lips, which is just sad, because he’s not even _there_ to make the tired joke. The last time they’d ordered room service, was, what, maybe four years ago? Belfast maybe, the sweet-faced boy who’d delivered them eggs and French toast with a side of semiautomatic and switchblade.

The smile dies on her lips. She should really get back to the Bus, she thinks.

Her gut twists again remembering the shades of her dream (it was something about him, killing him maybe – watching him be killed, something like that), remembering in real time all the evil he’s done in his life, even all the evil he’s done in the few months since their last meeting. She knows one of her first and last thoughts at seeing him is always _I should kill you, kill you before you kill again_ , and it’s such a god damn misery that she can’t – that she doesn’t, every time she sees him. It’s probably one of the reasons Coulson never acknowledges the pattern. Because if he said it out loud, that she wasn’t taking this shot, that she was being so absolutely inanely _selfish_ , then…then she would have to know it herself, and that’s just…that’s just not something, that she can do.

She remembers the only time she’d ever really come close. It was maybe the second time they’d ended up entwined and undone, some Russian stairwell way back in the beginning. She had orders to kill him on sight, she’s sure his orders were the same, but they’d run out of bullets at the same time and the door had locked from the outside. Hand to hand combat had turned into just…hand to hand.

Skye brings a hand to her face and flushes at the memory. It’s just, this stupid relationship is – it’s almost, volcanic, maybe, the reliability of it all. Pressure built up over time, and – and, fuck, it just – it just needed releasing…there’s just no stopping it, it feels like, sometimes, regardless of very human notions of ethics. Regardless of how long this _need_ – or whatever it is – can feel dormant.

Sometimes you just have to let nature run its course.

Of course he would pick that moment to creep up on her, her much smaller jacket over his shoulders in this way that’s supposed to make her laugh. And it does, almost; it makes her snort through her teeth before he slides the jacket off his shoulders, holds it over one arm like a freaking gentleman or something.

He takes the spot beside her, squatting on his heels, the unspoken message being _I’m not staying long_.

“What I wouldn’t give,” he starts, wry smile in place, “for some eggs – “

“Over easy, and some nice wheat toast,” she finishes. Grinning just the same as she looks away from him. “You know, for an evil mastermind – you’re really pretty damn predictable.”

“Hey,” he says, voice low and warm so she can hear. “I’m just a man of habit.”

The smile fades from her face then, her cheeks warming and tingling as his innuendo takes hold.

He _is_ , a man of habit. He likes it when she undresses in front of him. He likes kissing her neck right under her jaw, whispering things into her hair as he fucks her. This and a million other moments pass through her mind, swirling like the wind, making her hot and bothered. She wishes so ardently that things were different.

And she remembers, as he sits down for real beside her (he’s probably also replaying their habits in his head), the one time she managed to keep away for real. It was after Russia, when she let a turbulent year go by, when she tried other guys, other men, tried to coerce them into kissing her just below her jaw, tried to make them talk into her hair while they made attempts at love. It had all gone so poorly, and the frustration mounted in this way that was hard to easily notice all at once, not unless someone had a device that could read thoughts you were actively suppressing, and then thoughts you actively hated yourself for. To everyone else it just looked like she was invested in the cause, and May thought she was just toughening up finally, and everyone was getting excited that they were tracking him, getting closer every day –

And it had erupted, here, on the northern coast of Portugal. The storm had been raging overhead, inside her, no SHIELD jet could get close enough – _I’ll go in on foot_ wasn’t questioned, because she was so intense in her fury, so dedicated to the mission. She remembers being so drenched with rain when she got close to the house, her hair slapping across her face and her leather suit sticking to her body like skin when she saw the door open, open for her, the few dwindling candles in the room to illuminate his face as she darted close, drew a gun to his temple and almost – she almost had it in her to pull the trigger.

Skye leans back from her knees as it replays in her head, the way she’d held the gun there while they held a silent, rabid gaze, then both stripped desperately and furiously naked, the arcane, animalistic hunger in his eyes and his lips when he finally threw her arm away and she dropped the gun, and the way they came _together_ …with the spastic raw energy of a frayed wire.

She wonders if Coulson had known even then. If he’d suspected anything when her hour-long mission had turned into three, and that she’d been unable to look him in the eye for any specific length of time until she’d showered more than once.

He has to know, by now.

“Do you have somewhere to be?” he asks, sliding his arm around her, and it – it really shouldn’t do anything for her, but it does, because everything about him does things for her. And that’s her own fault. It’s her own punishment.

Skye leans into him, considers saying again that they shouldn’t be doing this, that last night had been the last time; but she knows it’s a waste of breath. She knows this just like she’s known the dozen times she’s said it before, sometimes just to make one of them laugh.

_We shouldn’t be doing this, she says over her shoulder, sticking her tongue out as she heads to the shower._

_We shouldn’t be doing this,_ _she breathes, staring at him as he undresses her._

_We shouldn’t be doing this, she pants, as she fucks him in the back seat of a station wagon in West Texas._

She knows it’ll only be a few weeks, maybe a few months before she’ll send him another opaque message on that private server, start tracking his movements a little too closely to see if he’ll end up in the vicinity of somewhere they know.

She knows she’ll get a message back, a time, some coordinates, and for a night, or maybe just an hour, they’ll indulge this fantasy that they’re just two people who need this, who just can’t keep away from each other, and that indulging in their relationship is just a kind of healthy, natural _release of pressure_.

Ward breathes in the gray, misty air beside her, and then he plants a kiss on the top of her head.

And she thinks – what kind of person is she, that she can do this with a man who stands for everything she hates? That she can keep coming back to him, though he’s _for_ everything she works against? He’ll kill her friends, cause mass destruction on a scale abhorrent to her, and she’ll be back – always, always guilty – still willing and wanting to see him again.

It’s stupid. It’s awful. She should just kill this man…it wouldn’t be hard. She has a gun and her phone in the house, she could grab it, she could sabotage _his_ motorcycle and leave _him_ stranded. How many people would _he_ kill before she saw him again? Why can’t she – no, why does _he still kill_ , when he has her? When she regularly brings into his life her lightness of being, her goodness, and this regular exposure to her means nothing in the end?

This is her torture, she supposes. This is what she deserves.

She curls even deeper into his shoulder and he holds her closer, maybe thinking she’s cold and she is, cold, cold in his arms, because she really should just leave. She should leave and never come back, maybe give Lincoln a chance, maybe see where that goes.

Ward tilts his head back down to her head, his nose slips into her hair, he takes a deep breath, and a need so deep and instinctual responds inside her chest. This will not be the last time, she knows.

Because…you don’t do it on purpose, but you do. You choose to love someone more than other people, maybe more than yourself, and all the awful things about them don’t matter anymore, or maybe they matter more than before, because you love them, and it’s your own fault for doing it. The rest of your body has to live with the consequences.

Skye pulls roughly and suddenly away from him and stands, turning back toward the little house. She walks knowing that he’ll catch up to her.

The wind stops as soon as she’s inside, and Ward closes the door behind them.

Trying to ignore his movements, she goes about the room collecting the last of her stuff. Her cell phone, back in her pocket. Holster on her thigh, gun into holster. He strips the bed and turns the mattress against the wall, because it won’t be used until they need it again. The empty bedframe is a sobering sight, and after seeing it, she looks Ward in the eye. He’s on the other side of the bed, t-shirt and dark jeans, hands by his sides, waiting for her to give him direction. His expression reserved and anxious all at once.

“When am I going to see you again?” he asks, because, he would ask. This relationship – maybe predictably – has always come easier to him.

She looks down at her shoes, uses her bad foot to smudge dirt off of the toe of her boot. She glances at her gun again.

“I dunno,” she tries, injecting her tone with much-needed coldness. “Have you ever considered monk-dom?”

Ward chuckles, and Skye’s shoulders deflate, tension gone.

“Not lately.”

“You might want to.”

They hold each other’s gaze then, lots of unspoken words going back and forth. He tries to open his mouth to say something, and she looks distinctly away, so he crosses the room and pulls her into his arms. She only struggles a little. The desperate need for him has ebbed somewhat; she’ll probably survive for awhile on her own.

His height and long arms nearly swaddle her, every available surface of his torso pressing into hers. For a long moment they stay there like that. He rubs her back, head hanging just above hers. Silence around them again, her face tucked against his sternum, her hand curled over her heart, then sliding up to her mouth.

“I hate you,” she whispers, feeling the frustrating sting of tears around her eyes. She does hate him and she doesn’t – she might hate herself more. Ward, he just holds her tighter, pressing into her as if she really might erupt without him to hold her together. It’s disgustingly comforting.

“I know.”

She feels a tear fall over her cheek.

And it falls onto his shirt.

He pulls back a little too quickly, and then he’s brushing her hands away from her face, thumbing her tears away from her eyes. She can’t meet his gaze, she doesn’t want to meet his gaze, but her face is in his hands and she has trouble looking anywhere else and then – there they are, those dark eyes, and they’re looking at her with such… It’s too much. It’s all too much. She’s responding to him already. And then he’s kissing her, hands cupped around her face like he’s holding something fragile and precious. She doesn’t even think about not kissing back. She doesn’t know how to stop her lips from meeting his, anymore.

The pressure is there again. Maybe it never left. Maybe they didn’t release enough of it overnight, but she feels it in her tense fingers and toes as they kiss, his tongue inside her mouth, his tongue sliding together with her tongue. Skye puts her arms atop his, then slides them up around his neck, brow pinched with worry that she’s not doing the right thing, blood singing that she is. The warmth of Ward’s mouth hums with a moan, and he presses his hips into hers, hands on her waist. She gasps as the sharp stab of _want_ glows hot in her pelvis. Ward groans again, walks them both forward with long, heavy, urgent steps until Skye’s back crashes into the wall. It hurts for barely a moment, but then Ward and the wall are compressing her, she can barely move, eyes closed, and her hands all sensation for him. Ward’s hands slide up her shirt, palms cupping the sides of her torso, thumbs pressing into her skin. She’s responding automatically, the need for him there as a blatant, awful demand. _One more_ , her subconscious is whispering. _Just one more_.

Skye hooks her leg around Ward’s, anchors her weight around his neck and pulls herself up. Ward groans audibly through their lips and grabs her around her ass, holding her up, holding her against the wall with his hands and his hips.

“ _More_ ,” she whispers, and Ward groans again – his mouth sliding off hers and to her cheek, her jaw, the side of her neck. He finds those sensitive spots he knows how to exploit so well – the heat _rages_ inside her and she _writhes_ against the wall. “ _More_ ,” she demands, grabbing the neck of his shirt and wrenching it open, the cotton shredding in her hands, the hands that now dart for his skin. Ward kisses her again, no subtlety all prisoners, and she leans into Ward’s kisses and then reaches for his pants, his belt buckle, yanking it open, digging her hand inside. She can’t reach much at this angle, but her fingers find the familiar hard base of his shaft, and she glances her fingertips around it, loving how soft and hard he is in this bare inch of skin, loving how he responds even to this.

Ward’s shoulders lean away, his hips really dig into hers for a moment before he’s pulling those away too, and she falls to the ground. She barely gets to think about what’s happening because then he’s ripping her pants open, shoving them down her hips. The gun holster was top of the line but it splinters when he wants it off her, the clattering of metal on the floor a distant echo. She’s pantless, he kisses her. He pulls her back against his body and then pushes her back against the wall. He grabs one thigh with one hand, drags it up and over his leg. He kisses his way to her ear, grabs the lobe between his teeth.

“This is going to be fast,” he whispers, and again – the surge of heat, the build-up, the need – she responds on every level, and all she can do is nod.

Ward groans again, presses his hips into hers again, and then he’s got both her thighs in his hands, and she’s locking her ankles around his back. Ward’s pants are still mostly on, her shirt is on, her bra is on, her underwear is on – and he rips those too, yanks them out of the way like some meager police tape, and it shouldn’t _be_ so fucking hot but he is, before he presses his fingers against her opening, and then sinks his fingers inside of her.

She groans, hot and loud, and it’s really all he needs to hear. Maybe all he needs to feel is how wet she is, because his fingers are gone as fast as they were there, and her brow pinches when she feels him – _him_ – at her opening instead. He pushes into her slowly, achingly, all too achingly slowly, each inch spread thick on a sigh. When he’s completely inside of her, she sags toward him, dropping her head to his shoulder and chest. The wall is rough and unyielding behind her back.

“ _More_ ,” she pleads, and it sounds so pathetic in her ears. She can’t dwell, because Ward complies, pulling back and _slamming_ back inside. It rocks her, literally and figuratively, and she cries out in some mix of pleasure and pain. “ _More_ ,” she urges, when he’s not moving all at once, and Ward kisses her – hard – a searing mix of the same emotions, before moving again. He’s starting a rhythm, and it’s meeting her needs, these needs she can’t get rid of, these needs she has of him. His pace is quick and effective and regular, and she bites her lip and holds him close.

His lips are on her neck, and her jaw, and her hair. “ _Fuck,_ ” he whispers into it, and she’s getting closer. “ _Oh, Skye, fuck_ ,” he mutters, unintelligible, pumping into her, his tempo increasing when she moans through her teeth and tilts her hips, driving their connection deeper. “ _Oh fuck, Skye – I need you. I need you._ ” He’s saying these things, and the heat is swelling inside of her. It swells when he starts panting against her neck, when she’s squeezing her thighs around his torso, when his hands grip her ass as he pumps himself inside of her. Every muscle – every fiber, every neuron of her being is connected to him, and the temperature is rising. It’s rising, and she digs her fingers into his hair, grabbing at it, pulling his head back until she can kiss him again, and again their tongues and lips are meeting, his cock is in and out of her, all the sweetest muscles of her body effected. She’s almost there – and she pulls back slightly.

“ _More_.”

His compliance is instantaneous. His cock drives hard and deep, and that echo inside of her – that echo for him – it responds, on just a few thrusts, to something she cannot replicate with anyone else.

“ _Oh, fuck, Ward!_ ” she cries out, uninhibited, all instinct, and it twists in the air with his strangled groan, with the groan that turns to gasp as he comes. They come back to themselves half-clothed, gripping each other against the cold wall in some crappy one-room shack on the northern coast of Portugal.

“ _Oh Skye_ ,” he whispers. Her shoulders sag, and she keeps her eyes closed.

And she wonders, as he kisses her, so long and so sweetly, if he’s going to suggest they run away again, stake out some island and pick a dumb name for it to live out old ages in relative peace. She wonders if they’ll go back to bed for awhile, if they’ll have to put the mattress back in its roughly hewn wooden frame.

 _No_ , she asserts to herself, feeling weak and feeble, and she pulls suddenly away.

No, it is time to go.

“I have to go,” she says, redundantly.

Ward’s breath is now tickling her hair, the strands at the top of her head warm and alive, sending signals of pleasure through her head, down her neck, down every bone in her body.

She hates this man, and she loves him. She knows she’ll be back.

Ward kisses the top of her head, lets her push his hips away, lets her feet float to the ground. She spares one last look up at him, his face all rapture and affection, and it’s one more stone to carry with her until they meet again.

It takes less than three minutes to get cleaned up, to get everything she came with, dropping his jacket to the floor where they’d kissed, collecting her own. She leaves before him this time, she does most times, because – they both know it – she’s more in the moral gutter than he is, when they’re together. It’s what allows him to smile so easily, she thinks, as he watches her go, allows him to salute her with two fingers as she gets one last look in, of him in the doorway, shirt and dark jeans. It’s awful. It’s beautiful.

And just like that, the pressure starts building again.


End file.
